-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Remember when SNES and N64 games cost up to $80.
- Thread starter Inglorious Man
- Start date
Most people think high polish and stellar presentation/production values means no bugs, but all games have bugs and some people are lucky enough to just never encounter them in some games.
Back in the day games had a cost of 120 Deutsche Mark. Basically €60 to €70 now. In Germany at least.
€3 the weekend where I lived. It wasn't enough time to beat JRPGs or N64 games, but perfect for games like Mega Man X, Whirlo or Contra 3.
My parents bought me 9-10 games but I could play >100 games thanks to the rent in the SNES era.
Only issue was that big games were hard to find because everyone wanted them.
But you're paying for relatively expensive cartridges. This time it's cheap optical discs and downloaded binary code. It's not a fair comparison.
Now artists do have to take longer, and games are grander in scope, so budgets go up. But the new prices aren't going to alleviate crunch, nor will they get rid of microtransactions, and developers aren't going to see that extra cash themselves.
I'd pay $100 for some games but it doesn't solve the rotten issue at the cores of the gaming industry.
Now artists do have to take longer, and games are grander in scope, so budgets go up. But the new prices aren't going to alleviate crunch, nor will they get rid of microtransactions, and developers aren't going to see that extra cash themselves.
I'd pay $100 for some games but it doesn't solve the rotten issue at the cores of the gaming industry.
Nope.
Don't remember seeing almost any game over $50 - but I always had to buy games from WalMart and had no game stores within 3 hours of where I lived. Not sure if that affects anything?
Bought Harvest Moon 64 for $49.95 and remember thinking how expensive that was.
And I vividly remember GameCube games costing $50 or less - again, at WalMart.
Maybe you all were shopping at the wrong places? I seem to remember going to a Toys R Us in the "city" once and their games were indeed much more expensive. Then I bought DK Land for more GB Pocket that day.
Don't remember seeing almost any game over $50 - but I always had to buy games from WalMart and had no game stores within 3 hours of where I lived. Not sure if that affects anything?
Bought Harvest Moon 64 for $49.95 and remember thinking how expensive that was.
And I vividly remember GameCube games costing $50 or less - again, at WalMart.
Maybe you all were shopping at the wrong places? I seem to remember going to a Toys R Us in the "city" once and their games were indeed much more expensive. Then I bought DK Land for more GB Pocket that day.
Last edited:
I owned a NeoGeo back in the day and used to spend hundreds of pounds on each game, I was importing consoles and games from Japan/USA since the Saturn launch so was spending hundreds on games then.
Gaming for me today is pretty much cheaper than it has ever been.
Gaming for me today is pretty much cheaper than it has ever been.
There were costs involved in manufacturing cartridges. Those costs no longer exist.
Back then console games were also single purchases without DLC, expansions, microtransactions, lootboxes, battle passes or any of the other ways that the internet allows companies to monetize games now.
So no, I don't buy that games need to be 70 bucks out of the gate.
Back then console games were also single purchases without DLC, expansions, microtransactions, lootboxes, battle passes or any of the other ways that the internet allows companies to monetize games now.
So no, I don't buy that games need to be 70 bucks out of the gate.
I know inflation and all but the thing in Europe is, we didn't have the Euro at these times. During SNES and N64 times here in Germany we still had the Deutsche Mark as our currency and games used to be 100-120DM, then the Euro pretty much halved everything to 50-60€ and now we are getting back to the old values on a new currency.
Yeah exactly. I mentioned it too. Deutsche Mark was something else hah :P
It sure was :P But yeah as per usual people in Europe get shafted when it comes to prices, not as much as Canadians and Australians but still.
Yeah. 120 DM was pretty expensive. I still remember when the PS2 came out and it was 849 DM. Crazy.
Yeah OOT did cost 120DM but wow while we eventually had a PS2 I don't remember the price of it anymore o.o All I remember is having to save-up for a few months to finally get a memory-card :(
I remember a holidays that I asked for Reyes (spanish Christmas presents tradition - kind of Santa but a couple weeks later) The Lion King for SNES. My parents told me then that asking that I won't probably receive any more presents…
Later on, when I discovered that the power of the Three Wise Men wasn't unlimited, I realized the reason. The game price was 12 000 pesetas. This value is equivalent to 72€ no inflation adjusted and to today's ~110€ considering inflation… Crazy.
Later on, when I discovered that the power of the Three Wise Men wasn't unlimited, I realized the reason. The game price was 12 000 pesetas. This value is equivalent to 72€ no inflation adjusted and to today's ~110€ considering inflation… Crazy.
Here's a website full of old Sears Christmas catalogues for those that want to check for pricing in a certain year (in the USA).
The game systems are normally toward the end of the catalogues, in case you're wondering - or just search for Nintendo.
In 3 years, we went from paying $70+ for Quest 64 and Superman 64 to paying $50 for Metroid Prime. PlayStation games were in the mid-$60 range at launch.
Why did all game prices drop so much in the 2000s, including disc games?
Edit: $80 for Quest 64!
Meanwhile, all GCN games seemed to be $50 on release in 2002.
The game systems are normally toward the end of the catalogues, in case you're wondering - or just search for Nintendo.
In 3 years, we went from paying $70+ for Quest 64 and Superman 64 to paying $50 for Metroid Prime. PlayStation games were in the mid-$60 range at launch.
Why did all game prices drop so much in the 2000s, including disc games?
Edit: $80 for Quest 64!
Meanwhile, all GCN games seemed to be $50 on release in 2002.
Last edited:
I think Majoras Mask with the gold cartridge was even more lol. Those times. I think when I got it on release it was this price. Memory Cards and controllers weren't cheap either. I think 50 or 60 DM? Crazy if you think about it now.
Yeah and that for 8-16mb of storage, these knockoff memory-cards were amazing back then! And now I wonder if the Pokémon Stadium 2 cartridge was also more expensive because of it's two-tone color, I don't remember.
Oh yeah I remember them. By Datel I think. Probably Nintendo always had "special prices". You even see it today with the Switch games.
Yup, like 90% of the games I played as a kid was from blockbuster and I only got an average of like 2 games a year if that that I actually owned. This thread is sus in its privilege.
And MadCatz! I'm still salty about my Pokémon XD save vanishing :( But yeah, that's why I don't mind buying most Nintendo games day one, because I know they won't drop anyway :P
The Nintendo tax. Latest example is the 3D Mario Collection :P
Oh yeah. Mad Catz is also a name I haven't heard in a while. I think they are gone too. How did that happen? Save game corruption?
Cause renting and buying used games were way more common back then
Yes correct but 30 years later games sell up to 35 million compared to back then a few million.
$50 was the general msrp from the mid 80s to mid 00s but some carts slow crept their way up there. If you were an 80s or 90s kid chances are 50/50 you were paying well past that on a cart
i don't think retailer/location was a factor but maybe
PS5 games will be 80€, the only games I (a N64 kid) ever bought at that price were Conker's BFD and Fire Emblem Fates LE. That being said, I am willing to pay 80€ if you guarantee me the game is complete (no dlc), playable always offline, no download required and does not have mtx. Like an N64 game.
Cant remember SNES games costing that much, but I do remember that N64 games priced itself awfully high.
it obviously will vary from game to game, and it's difficult to know what the actual numbers are
but I really don't think Snes games are a good example to justify higher prices in 2020.
each cart had a significant cost to manufacture, ship, sell; specially ones with "SuperFX" chips, larger ROM size, savegame battery and whatnot, this side of the cost per unit sold was high (excluding dev costs) now it's low, specially for digital sales when you divide per person the bandwidth used,
and they sell a lot more on average, can you imagine something making as much money as GTA V in the 90s? it's a completely different game, now the dev cost is also much higher, but if I had to guess I would guess that the profit of the best sellers nowadays is quite good, obviously if the game fails sales targets things will probably not going to look good since the investment is pretty high and people investing big money want big profit.
maybe it would be interesting also to look at PC games from the era, and PS1 games would also be more adequate,
but again, the market was very small compared to now, and making money post the initial sale with the game was rare.
I remember when I was a wee lad, I'd put on my Sunday best and walk the five miles into town to visit Alexander McTavish's Gaming Emporium and Haberdashery, where I could buy games for 4 shillings (or 28 pence) each, which meant you could get 5 games for a pound (a Developer's Dozen, we called it). "Tam," I'd say, it was Tam's father Alexander who had started the business. "Tam, gee'us a Devleoper's Dozen, and haud yer wheesht!" I'd say while flicking a pound onto the counter.
"Dinnae fash yersel," he'd say, as he slid off his stool and limped to the barrels of game cartridges which were kept at the back of store. He'd had the polio as a bairn, which had left him with a limp that had kept him out of The Great War. The war had claimed Tam's much-loved older brother Andrew, but it's not something we brought up. He'd scoop the cartridges into a paper bag, then roll the top of the bag down and seal it with twine. I'd then race home with my fresh new games under my arm.
But then, they brought in decimal currency. All of a sudden, there were only 100 pence in a pound. They lowered the price of the games to 25p, but then that meant you only got four games for your pound.
And that, my friends, is the greatest financial swindle in living memory.
"Dinnae fash yersel," he'd say, as he slid off his stool and limped to the barrels of game cartridges which were kept at the back of store. He'd had the polio as a bairn, which had left him with a limp that had kept him out of The Great War. The war had claimed Tam's much-loved older brother Andrew, but it's not something we brought up. He'd scoop the cartridges into a paper bag, then roll the top of the bag down and seal it with twine. I'd then race home with my fresh new games under my arm.
But then, they brought in decimal currency. All of a sudden, there were only 100 pence in a pound. They lowered the price of the games to 25p, but then that meant you only got four games for your pound.
And that, my friends, is the greatest financial swindle in living memory.
I didn't pay attention to cartridge-based console games back then, but I do remember seeing the price tag on Star Fox 64 (well, Lylat Wars) one time and just being kinda scared and confused by the prospect of paying that much for a video game. It didn't make sense. It seemed unobtainable, a rich people's plaything.
I definitely remember some SNES games costing upwards of $70.
I knew we'd eventually get back to that point, but I do think that we'll see a sliding scale from some publishers on certain games. Between $50-$70.
The industry is in a pretty interesting place right now. Technology has improved significantly, capable of delivering games in a way we've never experienced before. But these things aren't just automagically accomplished. You don't get a game with the visual fidelity of a The Last of Us Part 2, or a Cyberpunk 2077 by pressing a button. It requires a lot of time, talent, budget, and resources. It's not like those 4K textures are going to make themselves. Or the complex code to make immersive and deep gameplay systems write themselves. The cost of producing these games to the visual and technological expectations of the consumer is high. As a result, it was only a matter of time before it becomes financially unfeasible to keep charging $50 or $60 for some productions.
I'm not a fan of $70 games, don't get me wrong. But I also know first hand what it's like to put strain on my relationships and personal well-being because of the insane work hours I had to put in, and pressure from the suits lest I lose my job if I don't comply (thank god I no longer work for a company that treated its employees like disposable assets).
There's also a kind of symbiotic relationship between the gamers and the developers. We're paying them to create entertaining gaming experiences, but we're also demanding that those experiences become more and more complex and elaborate. I mean, look at the comments in that thread where The Pathless was revealed. So many people saying how the game didn't "look next gen enough." Or how Halo: Infinite was disappointing graphically (which I kind of get; it's a flagship title for Microsoft, so expectations were high, but that's also exactly the point I'm making). There's got to be some kind of middle ground and compromise somewhere. A balance between A) what we, as gamers expect/want from gaming, B) what we, as developers, are capable of producing (while also maintaining a healthy work/life balance) to try and satisfy those expectations from gamers, as well as exercising our own creativity, and C) what publishers expect commercially in order to keep producing A. I'm afraid the higher price for games is just one of those "solutions." My hope is that, as the generation progresses, we'll start to see all of those elements working together.
Like, Miles Morales is a "smaller" scale game in comparison to Spider-Man PS4, and it's releasing for $50, and on PS4 and PS5. It releasing on PS4 guarantees that it will sell more than enough to be commercially successful for Sony. It being a game built on an existing engine, means that Insomniac shouldn't have had to have stretched themselves to build the game in time for launch. And of course, it being $50 is a nice price for gamers to pay for such a high profile game. But I feel like those will be exceptions to the rule, not the norm, especially as the generation progresses, and moves away from cross-gen releases.
I knew we'd eventually get back to that point, but I do think that we'll see a sliding scale from some publishers on certain games. Between $50-$70.
The industry is in a pretty interesting place right now. Technology has improved significantly, capable of delivering games in a way we've never experienced before. But these things aren't just automagically accomplished. You don't get a game with the visual fidelity of a The Last of Us Part 2, or a Cyberpunk 2077 by pressing a button. It requires a lot of time, talent, budget, and resources. It's not like those 4K textures are going to make themselves. Or the complex code to make immersive and deep gameplay systems write themselves. The cost of producing these games to the visual and technological expectations of the consumer is high. As a result, it was only a matter of time before it becomes financially unfeasible to keep charging $50 or $60 for some productions.
I'm not a fan of $70 games, don't get me wrong. But I also know first hand what it's like to put strain on my relationships and personal well-being because of the insane work hours I had to put in, and pressure from the suits lest I lose my job if I don't comply (thank god I no longer work for a company that treated its employees like disposable assets).
There's also a kind of symbiotic relationship between the gamers and the developers. We're paying them to create entertaining gaming experiences, but we're also demanding that those experiences become more and more complex and elaborate. I mean, look at the comments in that thread where The Pathless was revealed. So many people saying how the game didn't "look next gen enough." Or how Halo: Infinite was disappointing graphically (which I kind of get; it's a flagship title for Microsoft, so expectations were high, but that's also exactly the point I'm making). There's got to be some kind of middle ground and compromise somewhere. A balance between A) what we, as gamers expect/want from gaming, B) what we, as developers, are capable of producing (while also maintaining a healthy work/life balance) to try and satisfy those expectations from gamers, as well as exercising our own creativity, and C) what publishers expect commercially in order to keep producing A. I'm afraid the higher price for games is just one of those "solutions." My hope is that, as the generation progresses, we'll start to see all of those elements working together.
Like, Miles Morales is a "smaller" scale game in comparison to Spider-Man PS4, and it's releasing for $50, and on PS4 and PS5. It releasing on PS4 guarantees that it will sell more than enough to be commercially successful for Sony. It being a game built on an existing engine, means that Insomniac shouldn't have had to have stretched themselves to build the game in time for launch. And of course, it being $50 is a nice price for gamers to pay for such a high profile game. But I feel like those will be exceptions to the rule, not the norm, especially as the generation progresses, and moves away from cross-gen releases.
I remember spending my hard saved money to buy myself a $79.99+tax copy of Chrono Trigger. Now, the main difference between then and now is more of that money went to the actual price to make the cartridge in the first place, compared to now just going through the various splits of retail/distributor/developer/etc. Chrono Trigger was on a 32 megabit cartridge compared to the 8 or 16 megabit brethren.
I don't remember that at all. The only places that sold games for that much were places like Funcoland. They'd tack on $20 to the price of a new game so that they could get you to buy a used copy instead and they would make more money. And this was before the Gamestop monopoly.
Yeah, when I was a kid we didn't exactly get many SNES games due to how much they were. Dk64 with the expansion was probably the worst, maybe £70, so about $140 at that time. In today's money it's even more.
Yeah more or less and I still bought it despite being able to emulate all three games better on my PC or in the case of 64 run it natively even so I'm part of the problem :P
No idea if MadCatz is still around but about my save-game, I came home one day from school, turned my GameCube on "This Memory Card has to be formatted" I pulled it out and back in an ever since then it doesn't even get detected anymore.
It's not a "pay this instead of microtransactions" price hike, it's an inflationary price hike and nothing more. Games today are cheaper than they've ever been when accounting for the value of a dollar over time, while becoming more expensive than ever to develop. Another $10 just isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
Biggest issue I have is digital. There are no materials, no shipping costs, no retail overheads or commission but yet they still cost more to buy than something that you can hold.
I understand why they might price physical copies more, but digital?
I understand why they might price physical copies more, but digital?
I remember i was allowed to buy one SNES game with my parents and it was Yoshi's island. It was the only game that wasn't 60-80$. It was around 40 and i didn't regret it.
Grandmas are awesome :)
I kind of came of working age during the 16-bit era, so I started buying my own stuff. I did get systems for Xmas gifts, though. It always bothered my mom and sister that I generally preferred to get one big thing that I really wanted vs a bunch of little things (that I usually didn't care about). That said, my parents still got me the one or two big things (SNES one yesr, Sega CD another year. I paid for half of a Genesis with my paper route as well as a NES).
I remember when FF III (VI) came out on SNES, I had 100$. I remember buying both FF III and AH-3 Thunderstrike for the Sega CD. FF III was 69.99USD and Thunderstrike was 29.99 (yes, that was its new price at the time). I remember getting through to the World of Ruin, taking a break and playing all of Thunderstrike, and then going back to finish FF III.
I also remember the local game rental place got in a copy of Phantasy Star IV when it came out. I was the only one who rented it, so they sold it to me for 80$
While I'm thinking of it, while the standard price for them seemed to be 49.99, a surprising number of PS1 games were 39.99 brand new. I remember paying that much for Star Ocean 2 at the time.. I also remember FF Tactics costing 45$-ish (I think it was like 42.99 for some reason.)
Last edited:
The thing about old cartridge games was that you were paying for the physical hardware in them. That hasn't really been applicable since the 32-bit era. Even modern "cartridge" games like Vita or 3DS or Switch aren't really cartridges, per se, they're just proprietary SD cards, a mass-produced storage medium. Yet still games have been steadily increasing in price. I remember NES games for around $30. PS1 and PS2 games were $50. If you're paying $60 for a game now, you're most likely not getting the full experience. A $50 PS2 game was the full experience. There was no season pass, no DLC, no microtransactions, no subscriptions, and they came with things like cheat codes and cosmetics already. I'd argue that most big publisher games are about $90 today for a typical experience.
I looked up the 1986 Sears Wishbook catalog. NES games were $24.99 or $29.99. $24.99 in 1986 is about $59.26 in 2020 dollars.
Also, movies on VHS were over $100 to buy in the mid-1980s. Movie budgets and production values have increased, but the purchase price for home releases is way cheaper now.
I looked up the 1986 Sears Wishbook catalog. NES games were $24.99 or $29.99. $24.99 in 1986 is about $59.26 in 2020 dollars.
Also, movies on VHS were over $100 to buy in the mid-1980s. Movie budgets and production values have increased, but the purchase price for home releases is way cheaper now.
Well at least Sunshine and Galaxy had a little bit of a remaster treatment so it's not to bad :P
Just read Mad Catz was bankrupt, but was saved in January 2018, so they are still in the market.
That's crappy, but that was often an issue with 3rd party memory cards, it happend with PS2 MMs as well,
so I always got the real cards just to be on the save side. But that certainly sucks though.
Yeah, and it was a bad time. At least they had the excuse of cartridges being expensive to produce. Then CDs/DVDS made that cost unjustifiable and games went down in price. Then they took our instruction booklets because "save the planet" Then they started selling digital games with digital hats for $100 for some reason and now a regular game is $70/80€. Meanwhile salary isn't getting any better.